Managing your Ansible Environment with Galaxy

Ansible is known for its simplicity, lightweight footprint and flexibility to configure nearly any device in your infrastructure. Therefore it’s used in large scale environments shared between teams or departments. This leads to even bigger Ansible environments which need to be tracked or managed in version control systems like Git.

Mostly environments grow with their usage over time, in this case it can happen that all roles are managed inside one big repository. Which will eventually lead to quite messy configuration and loss of knowledge if roles are tested or work the way they supposed to work.

Ansible provides a solution which is called Galaxy, it’s basically a command line tool which keeps your environment structured, lightweight and enforces your roles to be available in a specific version.

First of all you can use the tool to download and manage roles from the Ansible Galaxy which hosts many roles written by open-source enthusiasts. 🙂

It’s pretty neat but how does this help us in large environments with hundreds of roles?

The galaxy command can read requirement files, which are passed with the “-r” flag. This requirements.yml file can be a replacement for roles in the roles path and includes all managed roles of the environment.